Arthur A. Collins Legacy Association celebrates 100th anniversary of major radio breakthrough in Cedar Rapids

CEDAR RAPIDS — Years before the first trans-Atlantic phone call, and decades before international direct dialing would become available, a Cedar Rapids teenager had a direct line to one of the most remote places on earth.

And decades before companies like Collins Radio and Rockwell Collins became multibillion dollar enterprises, a 15-year-old’s ham radio was connecting Arctic explorers with the world from an attic on Fairview Drive.

On Aug. 3, 1925, Arthur A. Collins made headlines as the first person to communicate with MacMillan scientific explorers in Etah, Greenland on short-length radio waves — what The Evening Gazette in Cedar Rapids hailed as “a new chapter into the history of radio.”

For weeks, his rudimentary technology would be their lifeline to the Chief of Naval Operations at National Geographic, and the world.

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It wasn’t the first time he had communicated with the world. By then, he had talked wirelessly to people in Australia, Belgium, England, Guam, India, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Scotland.

But this thrill was the catalyst that would launch not only his own career, but the careers of thousands in Cedar Rapids whose technology continues to shape major world events to this day.

“He never had received a greater thrill than that when he talked to his friend on the famous expedition bound northward to explore a mystic continent,” The Gazette reported in 1925.

How he did it

Understanding the phenomenon of propagation in radio waves made it possible.

Near the turn of the 20th century, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi — who is largely credited with inventing the radio — started laying the groundwork for wireless telegraphy in the United Kingdom. But by 1925, the technology was still relatively archaic.

In the 1920s, the U.S. Navy, a sponsor of the Arctic expedition, was an ardent advocate for long-wave radio technology. But Collins and mentor John L. Reinartz, a pioneer of shortwave radio, had other ideas.

“(Collins has) got these inventions, all kinds of them,” said Mike Dupree, president of the Arthur A. Collins Legacy Association. “But the bigger thing he does is take all these inventions and makes them work.”

Longer radio waves, like the ones used by AM radio stations, tend to follow the surface of the earth and become weaker with distance. But with shorter, higher frequency waves, the ionosphere of the Earth’s atmosphere reflects the signals back with “skips.”

“They’re experimenting and discovering what physicists had predicted was ‘skip propagation’ on shortwave frequencies, which is the ionosphere reflecting the signal back for long distances in daylight,” said Rod Blocksome, a founding member of the Collins Legacy Association and retired Rockwell Collins electrical engineer. “It was a fabulous station by their standards.”

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By 1925, Collins knew he could reach the East or West coast with just a couple skips. The ceiling of his attic setup, covered with “QSL” postcards from across the country, documented his morse code communications with amateur radio operators across the country — a custom between “hams” that serves as confirmation of their communication.

“I don’t think they realized they were talking to a 15-year-old,” said Blocksome.

For a while, Collins used a 50-watt transmitter that consumes less power than many light bulbs. Most amateur radio stations in 1925 had power levels of 50 watts or less.

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For the MacMillan Expedition, Collins prepared a 1,000-watt transmitter on a “breadboard,” with a $110 vacuum tube purchased by his father — what would cost more than $2,000 in today’s dollars, if adjusted for inflation.

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“Considering the state of electronics and radio in the 1920s, it’s advanced,” Blocksome said. “You know he had to have studied a lot on his own to figure all this out.”

His understanding of propagation, as well as previous experiments with Reinartz, allowed them to reach Greenland in a way not understood by most.

Not even the United States Navy, whose confidence in long-wave radio failed the mission. As Collins received important messages and rode his bike to the Western Union station to telegraph them to the National Geographic Society, the Navy lost contact with the expedition.

The messages mostly contained Naval information. But a few offered novel insights into discoveries up north that left readers on the edge of their seats.

One day, Collins heard those aboard the U.S.S. Bowdoin sing “America.” Another later report noted that he missed an “Eskimo concert” broadcast by the MacMillan expedition when he wasn’t able to receive it.

Over the weeks of August 1925, he set records communicating via shorter and shorter radio waves as he moved from using 20-meter waves to 16.

“Biblical miracles were scarcely more weird than this one, and such an achievement as this would have been belittled vehemently 2,000 years ago,” The Gazette reported on Aug. 11, 1925.

The exhibit

Today, you don’t have to imagine how the birthplace of Collins’ legacy looks. Now, you can see it set up at the Collins Aerospace Museum in Cedar Rapids.

If you go:

Tours of the Collins Aerospace Museum are available every Wednesday from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

To arrange a visit of the Collins Aerospace Museum, visit thecollinsstory.org or contact Becky Woodward at tours@thecollinsstory.org. Advance notice and a photo ID are required to participate in the tour.

The exhibit, which took residence at the museum in July, has interactive pieces, explanations that put a teenager’s social life into perspective, radio artifacts and a life-size replica of Collins’ attic radio station.

Through replica and actual radio parts, visitors can see what cutting edge communications technology looked like 100 years ago, and how Collins pushed it forward over the course of the 20th century.

Alongside the replica of his attic, radio equipment, rudimentary prototypes and scans of Collins’ scrapbooks and letters to National Geographic line tables.

Blocksome, who has been giving tours since 1996, has worked to enhance the museum in his retirement as a way to entice more students into science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.

“This world is going to have to stand on technology, and we need more people in the tech fields to accomplish that,” he said. “This is one way of doing that.”

Collins’ legacy

Collins, whose father worked to make farming more efficient through an economy of scale, had innovation in his DNA. At a time when smaller family farms were more prevalent in Iowa, Collins Farms Co. was cultivating more than 25,000 acres in the Cedar Rapids area.

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“What he was doing was highly innovative,” Dupree said.

Collins didn’t take the conventional routes to success. Though a technical genius, he dropped out of high school.

He later attended Coe College and other universities, but stopped short of graduating from each one. Dupree and Blocksome said his professors asked him more questions than he could ask them.

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As the Great Depression set in, Collins found success selling radio transmitters to international ham operators from his basement. By 1933, his company had eight employees and $25,000 capital.

But despite his young age, quotes demonstrate that he understood the gravity of his breakthroughs and success — a progressive mindset that would come to define his work for decades to come.

“The real thrill in amateur work comes not from talking to stations in distance lands, not from receiving multitudes of ‘QSL’ cards from all the world, although these are things to stir your imagination,” he told Radio Age Magazine in May 1926, “but from knowing that by careful and painstaking work and by diligent and systematic study, you have been able to accomplish some feat or establish some fact that is a new step toward more perfect communication.”

In his own lifetime, Collins and his innovations have had a hand in reaching the Arctic, critical communications during World War II, the televised Moon landing, and more.

His nuanced leadership style was held together by a timeless, cohesive vision. The sky was the limit, and its only regulation was one’s imagination.

“It is necessary that we marshal the combined powers of many scientific and engineering disciplines together with man’s other creative and spiritual faculties in an effort to build a decent and meaningful world,” Collins said.

“Whatever your field may be, your progress will depend upon your individual imagination. I urge you to give it free reign.”

Collins was known for his aversion to media publicity and accepting attention for his work. Days before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969, he rejected an interview request from renowned broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite.

The late Myron “Mike” Wilson, the first director of quality assurance for Collins Radio Company, said he was an unusual leader — willing to dig into the details without bureaucratic barriers and, at times, willing to be laissez-faire.

“You could find him in a lab helping an engineer decide what the value of a capacitor could be. And yet, in the long ways, he could let hands off and let the management run the business,” Wilson said in an unpublished 2022 interview with Wired Production Group. “Arthur knew where the company was going to go and was supposed to go. … He could go off and concentrate on a single project because he knew that management would keep it going in the right direction.”

He was known to stay at work for 24 to 36 consecutive hours, getting by on “catnaps” at a “scrupulously spotless desk.” In addition to his dedication, he was known to think decades ahead of technological advances.

“In 1982, people didn’t have (personal computers) yet, but everybody in (Art’s) office had a Hewlett-Packard PC and he hooked them up to communicate with each other,” Ben Stearns, public relations manager of the Cedar Rapids Division in the 1960s and 1970s, said in a 2008 issue of a Rockwell Collins employee magazine. “In fact, the C-8400 Switching System they put together for the airlines was really an early forerunner of email and the internet.”

The museum docents and founders of the legacy association hope the next generation lets their imagination guide them, too.

Comments: Features reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.